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I don't think banning (my assumption of your intention behind nuking) is the correct course of action. I just had a similar chain of thought at a story of a st

by jk563 10y ago

I don't think banning (my assumption of your intention behind nuking) is the correct course of action. I just had a similar chain of thought at a story of a students union wanting to ban certain newspapers from the campus. My opinion is that, in that instance, the union should focus on the people who buy those newspapers. Why do they buy them? Do they agree with the messages? Or perhaps they are believing what they see without critical thought? There is then either an ideological debate or perhaps critical thinking education that can be undertaken. Hiding the message of an organisation or individual seems morally wrong to me. I'd much rather see the opinions published and shunned rather than outright censored. In the Twitter example, I'd like to see the classifications used to help understand the viewpoint of others or provide further information prior to posting, rather than to censor / ban individuals or groups. Not a fully formed idea, for which I apologise. My gut (and it is only my gut) tells me there is a useful aid there.

rtpg 10y ago
I have a bit of trouble with these arguments, because the "free speech" argument feels really recent to me. At it's core, twitter is an assemblage of communities. Twitter can simply decide that, no, it doesn't want neo-nazis on its website. These people are then free to go make their own websites to hang out on. Websites like Digg or Something Awful, despite also not being about single topics, were never sitting around thinking "Oh, I want to ban this guy that goes around calling black people monkeys, but free speech". Even 4chan would ban people for that sort of dumb stuff. I feel like this argument only became prevalent after reddit became big. There is an argument to be made that reddit's philosophy on this point single-handedly made all "community" websites worse, because it stigmatized the notion of "drawing a line in the sand", and implied that all websites have to accept everyone. I think in the newspaper example, Twitter is a newspaper, not the campus. People can make new websites easily, just like they can make new newspapers. Twitter is under no obligation to "publish" stuff if they don't want to. The internet is the campus. No DNS blocking, just banning users from some websites. And, honestly, the amount of people who care about the "free speech" issue dwarfs the amount of people who see Twitter as "the place to get trolled at". It doesn't seem like good branding to be at the same level as 8chan on this point. Though, to your point, on a more general level, figuring out what's going on in the audience for these sorts of messages is important.
- yomly 10y ago
  Actually I think there's more nuance than simply whether or not to silence certain views. The problem with the alt-right is that it is an idea. Ideas are very hard to kill by censorship and when you do let them "fester" they get more extreme and radical. This is in part how we arrived at the alt-right becoming what it is today. We should want the alt-right out in public in spaces where there are checks and balances. There, it can be killed by moderation (in both senses of the word, organic and inorganic) and dilution. If you push the alt-right to exclusively use their own walled gardens, to concentrate in their own unmoderated, subverted echo chambers, that's when you should be very terrified because that's when you birth actually scary groups. There will always be unpopular opinions on some subject. No matter how much proof you have, there will be flat earthers and creationists. No matter how much you promote equality, there will be bigots. But there is also always a continuum on the spectrum of these affiliations - some people may be mildly xenophobic and have valid concerns on immigration or have ignorant/antiquated views on gender equality, for example. When you take a hard-line stance on these opinions on the hope of promoting one ideal (no matter how noble) you always run the risk of also promoting the other through polarisation.
  - briandear 10y ago
    Do you think the "alt-right" is the only major problem? Try tweeting something against a Hillary or Obama policy during the election or challenge a 'liberal' person -- the responses can be no less harassing and vitriolic. This idea that the 'right' is a problem is in itself part of the problem. There is plenty of harassment from those that claim they are more tolerant than the rest of us. I do agree with your echo chamber point though -- one needs only to spend a few minutes on Mother Jones's comment section to read all manner of hate against those who have different opinions from their own. You are exactly correct -- the public sphere ought to welcome all viewpoints as sunlight is ultimately the best disinfectant. One of the reasons Hillary lost the election is that her campaign seemed to be in a bubble -- holding valid concerns of many groups in contempt while surrounding itself with voices that spent more time self congratulating or feeling intellectually superior whilst many Americans (such as in the Rust Belt) found themselves marginalized. The Obama campaign by contrast actually reached out to the so-called deplorables.
ben0x539 10y ago
I agree that that hiding opposing points of view isn't optimal. But there's a lot of nuance between hiding them, and not giving them a platform. The points of view of the President-Elect aren't in any danger of disappearing from view, they'll be published and discussed in the media regardless, and there's been plenty of white-nationalist websites with discussion forums for everybody in the alt-right to present their message. Another area where one might find nuance is between expressing viewpoints, and harassment and hate speech. It's perfectly possible to express oneself and one's politics respectfully. I don't think that's what anyone is talking about when there's talk about twitter needing to clean up their platform. Contrasting viewpoints are not the point of contention, it's whether people should be supported when they go out of their way to hurt and abuse and intimidate other human beings. Should twitter really feel obligated, morally or on any level, to sacrifice the well-being of the victims of slurs and harassment, only because of the (very tenuous and abstract, in this case) danger of censorship?
- jk563 10y ago
  I feel that if a victim is being harassed and / or abused then an authority should take action. This doesn't necessarily have to be the owner of a platform. For example, I would not expect the Royal Mail to stop delivering letters from a criminal who committed an offense via post. A separation of duties I suppose. Though with international platforms jurisdiction with law enforcement can be tricky, I'm sure I remember cases brought to court successfully off the back of Twitter abuse. Not disagreeing with your points entirely though. Perhaps there is middle ground in the platform providing analytics of this kind to law enforcement?
  - ben0x539 10y ago
    I think there's two separate things to consider. On one level there's the immediate individual occurence of harassment where I agree law enforcement should step in where applicable, instead of putting that responsibility on the platform owner (though it doesn't seem like law enforcement is typically equipped or motivated to do so, dedicated analytics seem like a good step towards addressing that). But I don't think that needs to preclude the platform taking action as well, simply to improve their product for the vast, vast majority of users who don't get off on harassing marginalized people. The other level is the macro scale effect of being the platform that's cool with white supremacists chasing other people away. Independent of your motivations for having a hands-off approach to moderation, you're gonna be emboldening them, making them feel welcome and comfortable and consequently growing a toxic user base. In turn, people who are particularly subjected or vulnerable to that sort of harassment will act in their self-interest and get the fuck out. "No moderation" isn't a neutral option, and law enforcement isn't going to take care of community management for you, so I think this is a strong argument for the responsibility of the platform to step in. I'm not sure if the royal mail comparison is really applicable. I guess you can frame every platform as some sort of public utility, but I think that analogy works better for lower-level sorta things like OS developers or CDNs. In particular I think the argument doesn't do justice to the role of twitter as a social space. Maybe a better comparison would be whether you'd expect a bar to continue to provide service to patrons with a history of starting fights with other customers? You'd also expect law enforcement to arrest people for assault, but I think it'd be reasonable that they wouldn't be let back in after trashing the place anyway.

by jk563 10y ago

rtpg 10y ago

I have a bit of trouble with these arguments, because the "free speech" argument feels really recent to me. At it's core, twitter is an assemblage of communities. Twitter can simply decide that, no, it doesn't want neo-nazis on its website. These people are then free to go make their own websites to hang out on. Websites like Digg or Something Awful, despite also not being about single topics, were never sitting around thinking "Oh, I want to ban this guy that goes around calling black people monkeys, but free speech". Even 4chan would ban people for that sort of dumb stuff. I feel like this argument only became prevalent after reddit became big. There is an argument to be made that reddit's philosophy on this point single-handedly made all "community" websites worse, because it stigmatized the notion of "drawing a line in the sand", and implied that all websites have to accept everyone. I think in the newspaper example, Twitter is a newspaper, not the campus. People can make new websites easily, just like they can make new newspapers. Twitter is under no obligation to "publish" stuff if they don't want to. The internet is the campus. No DNS blocking, just banning users from some websites. And, honestly, the amount of people who care about the "free speech" issue dwarfs the amount of people who see Twitter as "the place to get trolled at". It doesn't seem like good branding to be at the same level as 8chan on this point. Though, to your point, on a more general level, figuring out what's going on in the audience for these sorts of messages is important.

yomly 10y ago
Actually I think there's more nuance than simply whether or not to silence certain views. The problem with the alt-right is that it is an idea. Ideas are very hard to kill by censorship and when you do let them "fester" they get more extreme and radical. This is in part how we arrived at the alt-right becoming what it is today. We should want the alt-right out in public in spaces where there are checks and balances. There, it can be killed by moderation (in both senses of the word, organic and inorganic) and dilution. If you push the alt-right to exclusively use their own walled gardens, to concentrate in their own unmoderated, subverted echo chambers, that's when you should be very terrified because that's when you birth actually scary groups. There will always be unpopular opinions on some subject. No matter how much proof you have, there will be flat earthers and creationists. No matter how much you promote equality, there will be bigots. But there is also always a continuum on the spectrum of these affiliations - some people may be mildly xenophobic and have valid concerns on immigration or have ignorant/antiquated views on gender equality, for example. When you take a hard-line stance on these opinions on the hope of promoting one ideal (no matter how noble) you always run the risk of also promoting the other through polarisation.
- briandear 10y ago
  Do you think the "alt-right" is the only major problem? Try tweeting something against a Hillary or Obama policy during the election or challenge a 'liberal' person -- the responses can be no less harassing and vitriolic. This idea that the 'right' is a problem is in itself part of the problem. There is plenty of harassment from those that claim they are more tolerant than the rest of us. I do agree with your echo chamber point though -- one needs only to spend a few minutes on Mother Jones's comment section to read all manner of hate against those who have different opinions from their own. You are exactly correct -- the public sphere ought to welcome all viewpoints as sunlight is ultimately the best disinfectant. One of the reasons Hillary lost the election is that her campaign seemed to be in a bubble -- holding valid concerns of many groups in contempt while surrounding itself with voices that spent more time self congratulating or feeling intellectually superior whilst many Americans (such as in the Rust Belt) found themselves marginalized. The Obama campaign by contrast actually reached out to the so-called deplorables.

ben0x539 10y ago

I agree that that hiding opposing points of view isn't optimal. But there's a lot of nuance between hiding them, and not giving them a platform. The points of view of the President-Elect aren't in any danger of disappearing from view, they'll be published and discussed in the media regardless, and there's been plenty of white-nationalist websites with discussion forums for everybody in the alt-right to present their message. Another area where one might find nuance is between expressing viewpoints, and harassment and hate speech. It's perfectly possible to express oneself and one's politics respectfully. I don't think that's what anyone is talking about when there's talk about twitter needing to clean up their platform. Contrasting viewpoints are not the point of contention, it's whether people should be supported when they go out of their way to hurt and abuse and intimidate other human beings. Should twitter really feel obligated, morally or on any level, to sacrifice the well-being of the victims of slurs and harassment, only because of the (very tenuous and abstract, in this case) danger of censorship?

jk563 10y ago
I feel that if a victim is being harassed and / or abused then an authority should take action. This doesn't necessarily have to be the owner of a platform. For example, I would not expect the Royal Mail to stop delivering letters from a criminal who committed an offense via post. A separation of duties I suppose. Though with international platforms jurisdiction with law enforcement can be tricky, I'm sure I remember cases brought to court successfully off the back of Twitter abuse. Not disagreeing with your points entirely though. Perhaps there is middle ground in the platform providing analytics of this kind to law enforcement?
- ben0x539 10y ago
  I think there's two separate things to consider. On one level there's the immediate individual occurence of harassment where I agree law enforcement should step in where applicable, instead of putting that responsibility on the platform owner (though it doesn't seem like law enforcement is typically equipped or motivated to do so, dedicated analytics seem like a good step towards addressing that). But I don't think that needs to preclude the platform taking action as well, simply to improve their product for the vast, vast majority of users who don't get off on harassing marginalized people. The other level is the macro scale effect of being the platform that's cool with white supremacists chasing other people away. Independent of your motivations for having a hands-off approach to moderation, you're gonna be emboldening them, making them feel welcome and comfortable and consequently growing a toxic user base. In turn, people who are particularly subjected or vulnerable to that sort of harassment will act in their self-interest and get the fuck out. "No moderation" isn't a neutral option, and law enforcement isn't going to take care of community management for you, so I think this is a strong argument for the responsibility of the platform to step in. I'm not sure if the royal mail comparison is really applicable. I guess you can frame every platform as some sort of public utility, but I think that analogy works better for lower-level sorta things like OS developers or CDNs. In particular I think the argument doesn't do justice to the role of twitter as a social space. Maybe a better comparison would be whether you'd expect a bar to continue to provide service to patrons with a history of starting fights with other customers? You'd also expect law enforcement to arrest people for assault, but I think it'd be reasonable that they wouldn't be let back in after trashing the place anyway.